Television

Before becoming a playwright, screenwriter and showrunner, Tony McNamara was a stockbroker who had failed year 11 English. Now, after being nominated for an Oscar for The Favourite, he brings his acerbic dialogue and honest storytelling to his new TV series, The Great. “I saw a lot of Pinter, a lot of Mamet, Caryl Churchill … I was struck by how visceral it was, how you could get a rhythm going that really carries an audience along.”

Inspired by the interactions between his young daughters, Joe Brumm created a one-minute pilot that would become the kids’ television juggernaut Bluey. Here, he discusses the challenges of writing the show and reminisces about the blue heelers of his childhood. “Each episode has a number of components to make it good … It’s not just about coming up with a funny game.”

With today’s sequels and spinoffs often eclipsing their source material, Westworld, now entering its third season, takes the trend to a whole new level – presenting a futurist world of automatons with staggering richness and intricacy.

HBO’s The Plot Against America, based on the Philip Roth novel, brings together Winona Ryder and John Turturro in a reimagining of America’s World War II history. Now the slickly produced series is more pertinent to current times than the creators could ever have imagined.

As a co-creator of the new ABC series Stateless, Cate Blanchett hopes to challenge Australian attitudes towards asylum seekers, particularly as the climate crisis threatens to displace many more people. “The rhetoric of protection and the language has separated Australians from their humanity, and encouraged the public through a lack of transparency in information to tolerate or ignore human rights abuses that are going on offshore.”

After charming both critics and viewers with Please Like Me, Josh Thomas made the move to Los Angeles. He speaks about the series he made in his new city, Everything’s Gonna Be Okay – a show that breaks ground in its portrayal of young autistic women. “I think having teenage girls in a show forces you into sweeter territory. The conceit of the show is so sweet, so I guess the story and the characters and the situation kinda made that decision for me.”

Olivia Colman and Helena Bonham Carter shine in the third season of The Crown, which sees the royal family facing greater public criticism amid unrest in Britain.

With a superb cast and a cracking pace, the BBC–HBO adaptation of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials proves television is the perfect vehicle for the beloved trilogy.

Philip Pullman found fame in the 1990s with the His Dark Materials fantasy trilogy. Now, the children who grew up with the heroine, Lyra, can revisit her as an adult in The Secret Commonwealth. The author talks about having his work adapted for the small screen, the dangers of single vision and the allure of dust. “We know we’re conscious, but philosophers are still struggling with what David Chalmers calls ‘the hard problem’ – how do we get from matter to consciousness? Once you accept that consciousness is a normal property of matter, and that everything is, in however dim and rudimentary way, conscious, everything becomes clearer. This is the question towards which The Book of Dust is working.”

Contemporary mores are viciously skewered in the amoral world of Ryan Murphy’s The Politician, but the series has just enough humanity to keep its heart beating.